THE TWO ELEMENTS IN POETRY
The study of rhythm threw one fact of primitive life into very strong
relief,—the predominance of masses of men over individual effort,[250]
and the almost exclusive reign of communal song as compared with poetry
of the solitary artist, with that poetry which nowadays makes sole claim
to the title. Does this point to a fundamental dualism? Are there two
kinds of poetry, communal and artistic; or must one say that the choral
throng and the reading public, the improvising singer and the modern
poet, are convertible terms, with refrains, repetition, chorus, as a
negligible quantity? Is the making of poetry really one process under
all conditions of production; or does the main impulse, in itself
everywhere invariable, undergo enough change in its outward relations
and conditions to warrant the division of its product into two kinds?
Goethe is thought to have answered this question in his discussion of
certain Lithuanian popular songs, when he wondered “that folk make so
much of these ballads of the people, and rate them so high. There is
only one poetry, the real and the true; all else is approximation and
show. Poetic talent is given to the peasant as well as to the knight; it
depends whether each lays hold upon his own condition and treats it as
it deserves, in which case the simplest relations will be the best.” And
there an end, cries the critic; what more is to be said? Nothing, if one
is discussing poetry merely as an impulse to emotional expression which
springs simple and distinct from the heart of man. But there is more to
be said when one treats poetry not as the impulse, but as the product of
the impulse, a product falling into sundry classes according to the
conditions under which it is produced. Setting theory aside, it is a
fact that critics of every sort have been fain to look upon the product
of the poetic impulse as something not simple, but twofold.
As was the case with rhythm, where a tradition of the priority of verse
compared with prose led to extravagant theories of early man as singing
instead of talking, and realizing generally the conditions of an Italian
opera stage, so with this dualism now in hand; extravagant theories of
folk-made epics and self-made songs, have brought it into a discredit
absolutely undeserved. In some form, to be sure, this dualism of the
poetic product pervades the whole course of criticism, and varies from a
vague, unstable distinction to a definite and often extravagant claim of
divided origins; its differencing factor now sunders the two parts as by
a chasm, and now leaves them with only the faintest line between.
Always, however, this differencing factor is more than an affair of
words. It has nothing to do with classification of materials or of form,
as when Schleiermacher opposes the epos and the drama as “plastic” to
the purely lyric or “musical.” It is not the dualism of high and low
implied in Fontenelle’s delightful “Description of the Empire of
Poesy,”[251] with its highlands, including “that great city, epic,” and
the “lofty mountain of tragedy,” burlesque, however, in the lowlands,
and comedy, though a pleasant town, quite too close to these marshes of
farce to be safe. It is not the antithesis of definition, not a mere
exclusion,—poetry against science, pleasure against truth, imaginative
verse against unimaginative, emotional against practical and didactic;
not a separation of cheap, shabby verses from the poetry which Ben
Jonson thought perfect, and fit to be seen “of none but grave and
consecrated eyes.” In a loose application, this twofold character of the
poetic product takes the form of an antithesis between art and nature, a
vague contrast, with terminology yet more vague; and here, again, it is
not the rival claims of art and nature in any one piece,—whether
Natura fieret laudabile carmen, an arte,
or in any one man,—“the good poet’s made as well as born”;[252] but it
is the contrast shown by poetry that is essentially “natural” in origin,
over against the rival sprung from art. Often it is impartial: Jonson’s
learned sock, or the wild wood-notes of Shakspere,—“with Shakspere’s
nature or with Jonson’s art,” is Pope’s echo of Milton; but Milton’s
nephew, Phillips,[253] pits “true native poetry” against “wit,
ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself,”—Spenser and
Shakspere, that is, against his moderns. So one comes by way of these
great “natural” poets to the rural muse herself, who has always been
lauded and caressed when eulogy was safe. If mediocrities are versing,
“Tom Piper makes us better melodie”; and this is Spenser’s honest view,
not his “ironicall sarcasmus.” Back to the shepherds, says poetry, when
it is tired of too much art; rustic and homely and unlettered, is
opposed to urban and lettered and polite, song of the fields to verse
that looks across an inkstand at folios of the study. But this tendency
in criticism to rebuke poetry of the schools, its rouge and powder, by
pointing to the fresh cheeks of unspoiled rustic verse, is hardly to the
purpose.
Passing from this loose and popular account of the dualism, one finds
the contrast, still mainly unhistorical, but stated with precision, in
the æsthetic realm. Schiller, one of the masters in that school which
combined metaphysical theory with critical insight, divided poetry
into the naive and the sentimental; his famous essay, however, should
be read along with his poem on the _Künstler_, and with A. W.
Schlegel’s review of the poem; unsatisfactory as Schiller thought his
verse, it gives a historical comment on his theory, and he used the
idea of it for his Æsthetic Letters. It shows how art,—thought and
purpose, that is,—slowly took the place of spontaneity, and so it
gives a better because a historical statement of the dualism in hand.
Still, the phrase of naive and sentimental passed into vogue; this is
almost as much as to say objective and subjective; and one knows what
riot of discussion followed. Ancient was set against modern, the old
dispute, realist against idealist, classic against romantic,
conservative against radical; add short and pithy phrases from Goethe,
dithyrambs on “om-mject and sum-mject” from Coleridge; drop then, a
nine days’ fall, to the minor treatises in æsthetics: the thought of a
century has been ringing changes on this dualism. They are not to be
noted here, and are seldom to the purpose. Moses Mendelssohn’s
division into the “voluntary” and the “natural” looks at first sight
like an oracle from Herder; but it must be borne in mind that
Mendelssohn refused to regard as poetry those waifs and strays of song
which Herder praised. Masing, in a dissertation[254] of considerable
merit, divides into poetry of perception, which is rimeless, answering
to the classical or the objective, and poetry of feeling, which is
rimed and includes Christian, individual poetry: but there is no great
gain in this. Mr. E. C. Stedman[255] thinks poetry is “differentiated
by the Me and the Not Me,” and thus he obtains his two main divisions
of the poetic product. So run some of the purely theoretical
contrasts; without stay in historic study, their distinctions are
based upon the poetic impulse, and there is of course a far clearer
case when one considers poetry in the light of those conditions under
which it is produced. Æsthetic writers who apply the tests of
sociology, for example, have made a vast gain in their method of
treatment and in their results. Poetry to them is no vague, alien
substance, a planet to be watched through telescopes; it is an outcome
of the social life of man, and social facts must help to explain it.
Critic, historian, psychologist, all put new life into the æsthetic
discussion; and the artist himself is at hand. Earlier than Taine,
Hennequin, and Guyau, and along with Sainte-Beuve, Richard
Wagner,[256] in a practical purpose, and full of the ideas of 1848,
tried to bring the conditions of artistic production into line with
the study of society. It is not nature, he thinks, but the opposition
to nature which has brought forth art; man becomes independent of
climate; and social, human struggle is the making of this new man,
this “man independent of nature,” who alone called art into being, and
that not in tropical Asia, but “on the naked hillsides of Greece.”
Primitive man, dependent on nature, could never bring forth art, a
social product made in the teeth of adverse natural conditions.[257]
Wagner, however, goes further. Such is the history of art; but what of
its future? Art, literature, have become a solitary piece of
performance and of reception. The lonely modern man, pining for poetic
satisfaction, has but a sad and feeble comfort in the poetry of
letters. Back to social conditions, back to the old trinity of song,
movement, poem; back to the _ensemble_, the folk-idea, the poetry of a
people; let Shakspere and Beethoven join hands in the art that is to
be and that must spring, as it once sprang, from no single individual
artist but from the folk![258] Dithyramb apart, here is a theory of
social origins with a definite though curious dualism of art and
nature; Wagner talks _Jacob-Grimmisch_, it is true, and raves as
Nietzsche raved afterward; but he has sociological hints for which one
searches the school of Grimm in vain. Even in Victor Hugo’s fantastic
but suggestive phrases,[259] the new science, the agitation of St.
Simon and his school, may perhaps be found; and there is no disguise
of any sort in the sociological æsthetics of Guyau,[260] who repeats
Hugo’s notion in scientific terms, and so gives a precise expression
to the dualism once so vague. Primitive art, according to Guyau, is a
waking vision, and what we now call invention was at first nothing but
a spontaneous play of fancies and images suggesting and following one
another in the confusion of a dream. Real art begins when this pastime
comes to be work, when thought and effort seize upon the play of
fancy.[261]
These were mainly critical and æsthetic views. Of greater interest and
importance is the dualism as it took shape under the hands of that
historical school which had the great democratic movement in literature
for its origin, Herder for its prophet, and A. W. Schlegel for its high
priest. Here the dualism concerns not so much nature and art, uncertain
terms at best, but the body of people, the folk, the community, nation,
race, as contrasted with the individual artist, the “man of letters.” It
is poetry of the people over against poetry of the schools. Conditions
of this sort had been noted by earlier writers of what one may call the
scientific bent, that is, by men like Scaliger, who in this respect was
following Aristotle; not, of course, by those who looked upon the oldest
poet as divine, a prophet and a seer, the view taken by Platonists like
Spenser[262] and Sidney, by the early renaissance, by Ronsard, and by
belated followers of Ronsard. He, for example, not only says that
earliest poetry was allegorical theology, to coax rough men into ideas
of the divine,[263] but, in his preface about music,[264] written for a
collection of songs and addressed to the king, he holds to the idea of a
spontaneous and sacred perfection in this primitive verse. Later, so he
explains in his Poetics, came “the second class of poets, whom I call
human, since they were filled rather with artifice and labour than with
divinity,”—nature and art, again, in pious antithesis. It is different
with the scientific school. Scaliger, following Aristotle’s hints about
the origin of the drama, is for a normal process from the natural to the
artistic. Dante had made dualism a matter of rank, of merit, setting the
_vulgare illustre_ apart from the _humile vulgare_, and bidding
spontaneous, facile poets beware how they undertake the things that
belong to art;[265] Scaliger is not only historical but comparative, and
in the right fashion, assuming, at least for origins, no gradations of
rank. He is not for degeneration but for development; instead of
dividing the sheep from the goats, he regards nature and art as two
phases of the poetic conditions. Looking at the three forms of primitive
life,[266] he gives the parentage of verse to the pastoral; hunters were
too mobile, and ploughmen too busy, while shepherds had not only leisure
for meditation but the songs of birds as lure. In this earliest stage
Scaliger assumes two kinds of poetry, which he calls the solitary and
the social; and again in the second division he makes a further contrast
of the artless or natural,—not, he warns his reader, not to be classed
as vulgar,—and the more artistic, such as those amœbean forms which are
found in later pastoral verse. In other words, Scaliger hints at a
fundamental dualism; and his account of the matter, modern in spirit
despite its conventional style and its appeal to the ancients, is better
than Herder’s cloudy enthusiasm in all respects save one, and that, of
course, an exception of vast importance: Scaliger failed to put the
rustic and communal verse of Europe on a par with “natural” and social
songs of the prime.
This distinction of art and nature as a theory of origins, and with a
touch of the historical method in its treatment, is found again and
again in treatises on poetry from the renaissance to our own time.[267]
It is by no means confined to the brilliant and epoch-making writers.
Who was farther removed from Herder, so far as notions about poetry are
concerned, than Gottsched? But Gottsched, dull dog, as Dr. Johnson would
have called him, makes a clear distinction between natural and artistic
verse;[268] more than this, he backs his theory of origins by referring
to those “songs of the hill folk,” heard in his own day, which still
show characteristics of primitive poetry. Earlier yet, in the remarkable
work of Morhof[269] one finds use of the comparative method and a keen
sense of historic values; here is investigation, not theory outright, as
with the younger Racine,[270] or mere chronicle, as with M. de la
Nauze.[271] It is curious, too, that from the clergy came some of the
most rationalistic accounts of the dualism of nature and art, in
opposition to the divine and human idea of the renaissance. One must not
forget Herder’s cloth; Lowth took Hebrew poetry, as poetry, quite out of
the supernatural; and Calmet,[272] whose work on the Bible was once
valued by scholars, comments at length on the dualism as natural and
artificial, not as human and divine. Improvisation seems to be his test
for the natural sort, submission to rules and deliberation, his test for
artificial verse; and in the first case it is wrath, joy, sorrow, hate,
love, some natural outburst of passion, which is poetry by the mere fact
of its utterance. Moreover, this poetry of nature is found in every
clime;[273] and inseparable from it, in early stages, is the natural
music, song, which itself in course of time must be tamed by art. Like
Budde in our own day, Calmet points out “natural” songs in the Bible. It
was left, however, for Herder to bring forward all natural, artless
poetry not as a regret but as a hope, or rather as a disinherited exile
come back to claim his own; how the German pleaded for his client, and
with what success, is matter of common fame. At the historical school of
which he is the conspicuous exponent in matters of poetry we must give a
closer look.
Herder, in point of fact, was before a larger tribunal than that of
poetry, and in his plea for communal verse he was joining the great
democratic movement which ran through European thought at large, no less
active because less conspicuous in science, art, letters, religion, than
in affairs of state. A passion for democracy had gone from literature
into politics and again from politics into literature, begetting this
notion of creative power in the people as a whole; about the time that
philosophers discovered the people in politics, Hamann and Herder
discovered the folk in verse. The earlier eighteenth century, like all
the preceding Christian centuries from the time of St. Augustine,[274]
when saint or prophet or king was the embodiment of progress, still
turned history into biography, and human development into a series of
individual inventions; any movement in social life, whether of war or of
peace, was due to the great man,—general, king, orator, poet,—who began
or led the movement. Pascal’s pleasantry about Cleopatra and her nose
became a serious system of history and philosophy. Even as late as
Turgot,[275] for example, one pinned one’s faith to great men, to
genius, for the advancement of mankind. The seventeenth century had
asked for _raison_; the eighteenth sought _esprit_.[276] Genius was
already a watchword when the democratic movement began, and it was not
discarded by the new school; the Rousseaus and Herders clung to genius,
but with a new interpretation of the word, and added that larger idea of
“nature.” Critics are apt to forget that the return to nature was
preceded by a return to genius. The next step was to substitute natural
genius for the great man, to separate genius from the individual; and
here the democratic movement found help at hand in the progress and
gains of science. Science was now clear of the church, and began to work
into the domain of law, causes, force; it sought the impersonal both in
natural and in supernatural things. Cold and analytic in the earlier
decades, science in the later eighteenth century grew emotional,
synthetic, romantic, and full of zeal for what the Germans call
“combination.” What a change from the earlier mood, represented, one
might say, in Shaftesbury’s letter on enthusiasm! “Good humour,” he
writes in 1707,[277] “is not only the best security against enthusiasm,
but the best foundation of piety and true religion.” Even as late as
1766, when the spirit of enthusiasm was again abroad, aristocratic
Horace Walpole sounds the old note against the new communalism in his
account of a sermon which he heard Wesley preach at Bath; the preacher
“exalted his voice, and _acted very ugly enthusiasm_.” Enthusiasm,
however, was now rife in science itself; still blocked on the
theological side, it turned to nature and what lay undiscovered in her
domain. No talk as yet of a struggle for existence, no distinct lapse of
faith in humanity as main object of cosmic solicitudes; but a
disposition to find in the sweep and conflict of natural forces
sufficiently good answer to any question about the history of man, and a
tendency to force upon individual men a transfer of values to the race.
Not the individual, but the mass, and behind this mass the currents of
life at large, were to interpret history. The great man disappeared, or
else served simply as mouthpiece for the national and popular genius;
and it was at this point that Herder appeared with his _Thoughts for the
Philosophy of the History of Mankind_,—thoughts that here and there
foreshadow the doctrine of evolution. Down to the extreme theories of
Buckle, this point of view was taken by historians and philosophers.
True, much is said of the individual; Rousseau, Goethe in his _Werther_,
Herder, even, and Hamann, all glorified the free, individual man; it is
not individual man in the old sense, however, but rather man himself as
type of the human brotherhood, as one of a throng, the “citizen” whether
high or low. More than this, it was a glorification of primitive man
himself without the differencing and individualizing work of culture;
the eighteenth century, and not merely in Rousseau’s sentimental
fashion, discovered the savage on one side, and, on the other side,
unspoiled men of the prime. In literature there was an outbreak of
gentle savages and a very mob of Robinson Crusoes; while for philosophy
and science, the alchemy of human perfectibility, a desire to
reconstruct society by the elixir of primitive life and a study of man
as he ought to be, preceded the chemistry of modern anthropological and
sociological researches, which aim at an analysis of earliest social
conditions and the science of man both as he was and as he is.
This democratic thought of the eighteenth century had an outer and an
inner circle, answering in great measure to the notion of humanity and
the notion of the people or “folk.” It was Vico who put men upon the
first trail, who reformed scientific methods, and who, with all his
antiquated theories, is often so surprisingly modern. He bade men look
for the mind of humanity, the soul of it, as revealed in history,
poetry, law, language, religion. He traced something of the inner circle
as well, tossing aside Homer’s personality, and saying that Homer was
the Greek people itself as it told the story of its deeds. He set up the
antithesis between imagination and reason, and gave the formula of
culture as a decrease of the one and an increase of the other. Herder
said these things seventy years later, and indeed his mere plea for
humanity and nationality[278] adds little to the ideas of Vico; what the
German added of his own was on the larger scale a substitution of people
for race, and on the smaller scale a plea for the actual folk about one,
the community of rustics, the village throng, not idealized shepherds
and subjects of the Saturnian reign. From Vico to Herder, then,
democracy was in the air, pervading the rationalism that so easily
turned into sentiment and the naturalism that so readily fabled a new
supernaturalism. Particularly in its theories of poetry the eighteenth
century responded to the democratic impulse along three lines, the
scientific, the historical, and what one would now call the ethnological
and sociological.[279] A detailed account of these three currents of
thought in their effect upon the study of poetry would be of interest
and profit in the present work, but demands too much space; it must be
reserved for separate treatment. We must confine our attention to the
movement for communal or popular verse, and even that must be described
in merest outline.
The first man in Europe to recognize poetry of the people, and to make
it a term of the dualism now in hand, was Montaigne. He discovered the
thing and gave a name to it,—_la poésie populaire_; he praised it for
its power and grace; and he brought it into line with that poetry of
savages then first coming into the view of European critics. The
specimen which he gave of this savage verse remained for a long time the
only one commonly known in Europe; in like manner, a Lapland _Lament_,
published in Scheffer’s Latin, came to be the conventional specimen of
lowly or popular song. Montaigne, however, spoke boldly for the critical
value of both kinds, savage and popular, bidding them hold up their
heads in the presence of art. He praises the two extremes of poetic
development, nature and simplicity on the one hand, and, on the other,
noble artistic effort; for what Cotton translates as “the mongrets” he
has open scorn.[280] Along with the savage verses which he quotes in
another essay[281] he makes shrewd comments on the refrain and the
dancing, shows an interest in ethnology, and even names his
authorities,—“a man in my house who lived ten or twelve years in the New
World,” and in smaller degree natives to whom he talked at Rouen. Now
this insight, this outlook, of Montaigne are unique. Sidney, whom a
German scholar[282] praises for catholicity of taste equal to that of
Montaigne and not derived from him, is too academic; he notes the
_areytos_ of America, by way of proof that rudest nations have poetry,
and bursts out in that praise of “the old song of Percy and Douglas,”
only to take away from its critical value by a limitation quite foreign
to the spirit of Montaigne. Neither Sidney nor Puttenham,[283] in their
notice of savage and of communal poetry, came anywhere near the
Frenchman’s point of view.
The catholicity and discernment of Montaigne, the careless approval of
Sidney, the comparative vein in Puttenham, had really no following in
Europe until Herder’s time. Poetry of the people remained a literary
outcast; and as late as 1775 a German professor “would have felt
insulted by the mere idea of any attention” to such verse.[284]
Englishmen, to be sure, began long before this to collect the ballads,
to print them, and even to write about them in a shamefaced way; but
this was eccentricity of the kind for which, according to Matthew
Arnold, continental folk still make allowance. Ambrose Phillips, or
whoever made the collection begun in 1723, is very bold in his first
volume; he “will enter upon the praise of ballads and shew their
antiquity;” in the second volume he weakens, and will “say as little
upon the subject as possibly” he can; while in the third volume he
actually apologizes for the “ludicrous manner” in which he wrote the two
other prefaces. He had suggested that the ballads were really “written
by the greatest and most polite wits of their age”; but nobody in
England paid much heed to the subject of origins, barring a little
powder burnt over the thing by Percy and Ritson; and the making of a
theory, the founding of ballad criticism and research as a literary
discipline, was left to German pens.
It has been said that Herder was the prophet of the faith in communal
poetry. Herder’s “origins,” so far as this doctrine is concerned, are
interesting enough. That the individual is child of his time, child of
his race, child of his soil; that he is not only what “suns and winds
and waters” make him, but what long ages and vast conspiracies of nature
and the sum of human struggle have made him,—strand by strand of this
cord can be brought from Hamann, from Blackwell, Lowth, Robert Wood,
Hurd, Spence, from Condorcet, Montesquieu, Rousseau; but all that does
not make up Herder. It was his grasp of this entire evolutionary
process, his belief in it, his fiery exhortation, in a word, his genius,
that made him the only begetter of the modern science. Full of scorn for
closet verse of his day, he held up the racial or national, the
“popular” in its best sense, against the pedantic and the
laboured,—poetry that beats with the pulse of a whole people against
poetry that copies its exercises from a dead page and has no sense of
race. He sundered poetry for the ear from poetry for the eye, poetry
said or sung from poetry that looks to “a paper eternity” for its
reward. Under his hands, in a word, the dualism became real, a state of
things impossible while one was juggling with an adjective like
“natural” or with a phrase like “naive and sentimental.” He gathered and
printed songs of the folk, as he calls them, or by another title, voices
of the nations.[285] Here, of course, is lack of precision; a peasant’s
song and a soliloquy of Hamlet, one because really “popular,” the other
because really “national,” are ranged alike as folksongs. But the
dualism stands. Oral, traditional, communal poetry, and whatever springs
from these, are set clearly against poetry of the schools. Naturally,
Herder was unjust to the cause of art, or rather he seems to be unjust.
What he does is to bid the artist stand for a community or race and
reflect their life, or else fall, a negligible and detached thing.
Poetry is a spring of water from the living rock of community or nation;
whether Moses, Homer, Shakspere, dealt the unsealing blow, or whether
the waters gushed out of their own force, Herder cared not a whit.
This doctrine of a dualism in poetry was still further elaborated by A.
W. Schlegel, who brought to the task not only his unerring literary
tact,[286] his critical insight, his astounding sympathy for foreign
literatures, but his method of historical and genetic research. In his
early essay on Dante, he broke away from the method then in vogue, and
used historical tests instead of that philosophical analysis so dear to
Schiller. No one has stated the dualism of communal and artistic poetry
so clearly as Schlegel has done;[287] and yet, owing to a curious lack
of perspective in modern criticism, he is credited with the achievement
of crushing the dualism to naught. Leaving the details to another
occasion, we may give a brief outline of this case, which has so
distinct a bearing on the question of poetical origins. In his lectures
and in sundry essays, Schlegel states the historical dualism, and
repeats Aristotle’s account of early communal and improvised verse,
adding, however, what Aristotle refused to give, recognition of this as
poetry and respect for its rude nobility of style. As Schlegel left the
matter in his lectures, there was nothing to which one could raise an
objection; and the same is true of a temperate statement, made by
Wilhelm von Humboldt,[288] which may be quoted here at length. “In the
course of human development,” he says, “there arise two distinct kinds
of poetry, marked respectively by the presence and the absence of
written records. One, the earlier, may be called natural poetry; it
springs from an enthusiasm which lacks the purpose and consciousness of
art. The second is a later product, and is full of art; but it is none
the less outcome of the deepest and purest spirit of poetry.” One sees
it is not the communal bantling that has to be praised and defended
here; not rude, uncivil verse that once found an advocate in Herder, but
now needs no advocate; it is the poetry of art that must be lauded and
protected as even-christian with “natural” verse. Democratic ideas had
put the poetry of nature above all else; the pantheistic doctrines of
Schelling, carrying even Schlegel off his feet, had made a school for
the universal, general, communal, absolute, in verse; and a wholesome
reaction had set in. Humboldt’s modest words could have been signed by
nearly every critical warrior, Trojan or Tyrian, who took up his pen in
the long dispute; the trouble had begun when scholars tried to give
details about the origin of natural or popular verse and essayed to draw
close lines of definition between the people and the artist. Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm, full of romance, piety, and pantheism, laid stress upon
this kindly word “natural” and dogmatized it into a creed.[289] A song
sings itself; a “folk” can be poet; nations make their own epic; the
process is a mystery: these and like phrases are now regarded by
short-sighted critics as a fair summary of the democratic or communal
doctrine of poetry, and are thought to have been blown into space, along
with the doctrine, by a clumsy jest of Scherer about the Pentecost.
Scherer, indeed, has given a history of this movement, with what seems
to him a closing of the account, in his admirable book on Jacob Grimm;
but neither this nor his jest can be regarded as final. He appeals to
Schlegel as the great literary critic who really killed this doctrine of
the folk in verse as soon as it was born, although the great reputation
of the Grimms gave it an appearance of life and vigour down to the time
say ... of Scherer. Now it is a fact, overlooked by German scholars,
that A. W. Schlegel laid down a theory of communal origins, almost
identical with that of the Grimms, at a time when Jacob was barely
fifteen and Wilhelm fourteen years old. In an essay on Bürger,[290] whom
he loved and admired, Schlegel asks whether this man of genius was
really what he thought he was, a poet of the folk, and whether his
poetry could be called poetry of the people. To answer the question,
Schlegel makes a study of old ballads, and says that these were not
purposely made for the folk, but were composed among the
people,—“_composed, in a manner of speaking, by the folk itself as a
whole_.”[291] This community which made the old ballads was of course
homogeneous; the style of them is without art or rhetoric; they come
spontaneously. In short, “the free poetic impulse did that with ease and
success to which the careful artist now purposely returns.” Here is the
later doctrine of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a nutshell; how much of it
did Schlegel reject fifteen years later in that famous criticism[292] of
the Grimms’ _Old German Forests_, where he turns state’s evidence
against his fellow conspirators for demos? Simply its extravagances, but
by no means its reiteration of a dualism in the poetic product springing
from conditions of production. That idea stands intact; for all of
Schlegel’s historical studies are based upon it. Moreover, the Grimms
said far more than Schlegel had said, and went into deeper extravagances
of romance. He denied their assumption that the great mass of legend,
song, epic, which one finds or surmises at the beginnings of a national
literature, is the authoritative and essentially true deliverance of the
nation itself. Nor is there a pious mystery—and here Schlegel touches
the quick—in the making of such songs. A poem implies a poet. In brief,
the Grimms were not to furbish up the idyll of a golden age, bind it in
a mystery, and hand it over to the public as an outcome of exact
philological studies. This process, he said in sum, is all theory and no
fact; and here lies the stress of Schlegel’s criticism, which really
involved only a partial and superficial recanting of his own doctrine.
He was always wont to turn from theory to fact, and in the Grimms’ wild
theory he found no facts at all; he protests against the self-made song,
the folk-made song even; but he would have been the first to give ear to
any plea for a difference between songs of art and songs of the people
that was based on facts and that might bring out those social conditions
which determine the poem as it is made. He had himself repeatedly
brought out these conditions, these facts, and he nowhere recants the
doctrine which he founded on them. He unsays, perhaps without
consciousness of any change of opinion, his old saying about the folk as
a poet; he does not unsay his belief in the dualism of poetry according
to the conditions under which it is produced. “All poetry,” he declares,
“rests on a union of nature and art; without art it can get no permanent
form, without nature its vitality is gone.” True; but there is communal
art and there is individual art, or rather there are two kinds of poetry
according as art and the individual or instinct and the community
predominate; and this dualism he had repeatedly affirmed, just as
Aristotle had hinted it long before him. Schlegel does not reduce it to
a mere matter of record,[293] as modern critics do when they seize upon
Humboldt’s saying that the difference between oral and written is the
“mark” of the dualism—he does not say its essence; for it is treated,
even in this critical essay, as a matter of conditions of production.
The scholar who took up poetry on the genetic and historical side, who
followed brutish and uncivil man slowly tottering into the path of art,
is not lost in the critic who simply refuses to see primitive poetry
bursting by miracle out of a whole nation into an Iliad, a Nibelungen
Lay, a Beowulf.
This, then, is particularly to be borne in mind; the dualism of the
poetic product based on the difference between communal and individual
conditions of production does not rise and fall with the dualism as it
took shape in the theory of the Grimms.[294] Aristotle had set aside all
unpremeditated, artless verse of the throng, and had regarded it at best
as mere foundation, no part of the poetic structure. Jacob Grimm went to
the other extreme, and set off from poetry all laboured, premeditated,
individual verse; he accepted modern poetry, to be sure, but explained
away the poet; the superstructure was nothing save as it implied that
unseen foundation. Or, to put it in different phrase, the old doctrine
of imitation as mainspring of poetry had yielded to the idea of a power,
an informing energy; one turned, like Addison, to the imaginative
process, or else to deeper sources. Herder told men to seek this source,
this poetic power, in the people, with their primitive passions and
their unspoiled utterance. Herder was general, often merely negative,
and exhorted; the Grimms were positive and dogmatized, teaching that the
whole people as a whole people once made poetry. But this extravagance
must not drag down in its death those sober facts about which criticism
has always hovered with its hints or statements of the twofold nature of
poetry. Moreover, just as these facts are to be held in plain view, and
not lost in the haze of an impossible theory, so, too, they are not to
be rationalized and explained away into a facile, unmeaning phrase about
the difference between oral and written record. It is a question of the
difference in poetic production due to varying conditions under which
the poetic impulse has to work; and some difference of this sort, not of
mere record, is recognized in the whole range of criticism, mostly,
however, by expressions about art and nature which leave much to be
desired in the way of precise statement. Nature and art are terms of
æsthetics; even when used in a more or less historical sense, the
historical comprehension of them is uncertain; can they not be
transferred then, to terms of sociology, of ethnology, of literary
conditions, so as to correspond with the actual facts of poetry and with
the actual history of man,—transferred in good faith, and for the
interests of no theory, but to provide clear tests for an investigation
which studies communal poetry in order to determine whether it can throw
light upon the conditions of primitive song? There is certainly such a
dualism of conditions apart from the record. Even the most intrepid
monist allows the dualism of the term “mankind” according as one takes
man social or man individual, the solitary man of reflection, ethics,
judgment, and the same man as one of a crowd of madmen—mad for the
nonce, mad gregariously, but mad. M. Tarde has recently drawn this
picture in very bold outlines. There are two men in the juryman,—the
individual and the juryman. Does this, then, hold in poetry? It is a
fact that poetry made by a throng, or made in a throng, or made for a
throng, or made in whatever fashion but finding its way, as favourite
expression, to a throng—and every theory of communal verse may be
referred to one of these cases—is a quite distinct kind of poetry from
that which is made by the solitary poet for the solitary reader.
Nowadays nearly all poetry is written and read, but once upon a time
nearly all poetry was sung and heard; a very hasty glance at this
antithesis will show that it concerns production at least as much as it
concerns the record. It serves as basis for the division of poetry into
one class where the communal spirit and environment condition the actual
making, and into another class where the artist, the individual, has
upper hand from the start.[295] It sets primitive poetry, at least in
some important characteristics, over against the poetry of modern times.
If, then, communal poetry still exists in survival; if the sense of
literary evolution, the facts of literary evolution, the facts of
ethnology, the conclusions of sociology, all assert that primitive
poetry was communal rather than individual in the conditions of its
making; then it is clear that a study of the survivals ought to be one
of the best ways by which one could come to reasonably sure conclusions
about poetry of the prime.